Abstract

This article addresses the question: what do Xhosa-speaking students, products of DET education, do with English? The question arose in the context of the first year English course at Good Hope College of Education, Khayelitsha, Cape Town. Colleagues and I had observed that students had rebelled against what I expected them to do in the course. One of the questions which arose from that experience was: What can the students do with English? I rejected the inherent deficit thinking in that question and it was transformed into: What do the students do with English?To answer that question I decided to collect a sample of data written by English Second Language (L2-English) speakers and analyse it in terms that would avoid deficit assumptions about students use of English.